Field
The subject matter disclosed herein relates to memory diagnostics and more particularly relates to computer memory allocation techniques for memory test diagnostics.
Description of the Related Art
An ideal memory diagnostic should be capable of checking all memory addresses in a computer system in order to be sure there is no defective cell. However, this is not possible by practical means since the diagnostic application itself occupies memory space with its own code. Further, when running a memory diagnostic over an operating system (OS), such as Windows or Linux, this problem is bigger since the OS may use a huge amount of memory for itself. Additionally, other applications may run at the same time as the memory diagnostic application, for example when the computer system is a server. In addition, the memory diagnostic must also deal with fragmented memory. Further, existent diagnostics that run on some operating systems allocate shared memory regions, which have no guarantee to not be paged to disk.